About a year ago the company I worked for sold it's web development and hosting arm off to one of the three partners in the parent corporation. The partner happens to be my father in law, who enlisted my assistance in helping him move the business to the next level. As part of this he purchased three new servers, and a license for H-Sphere from what was formerly P-Soft. P-Soft has since been purchased by Parallels, which also owns Plesk. For…
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Added by Lars on October 16, 2008 at 11:30am —
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This week, Oct. 13 - 17 is my former employer's audit week. Because a few of their customers are publicly traded corporations, and my former employer processes financial information for them, they are required to pass an annual SAS-70 Type-II audit.
I told my new employer at the interview that I could start, but would have to be available to my previous employer for this week. So, I'm back to being a Wi…
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Added by Lars on October 12, 2008 at 5:54pm —
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Well week two with the MacBook down. I've found that Ctrl-A replaces "home" and Ctrl-E replaces "end" for moving around the command line. I invested in an actual aluminum Apple keyboard. I've found that touch typing on this keyboard is a bit easier than using a standard PC keyboard to work on the Mac. I'm not sure why it's different, other than Ctrl, Option, and Command are in the same ord…
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Added by Lars on October 12, 2008 at 5:50pm —
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I started a new job this past Monday, Sept. 29th. All of the desktops in the new office are Macbooks or Macbook Pros. I’ve used OS X before, but not since just after Tiger 10.4 was released, and never in the roll of a Unix Administrator. So far the machine seems to do most of what I want it to with few unexpected changes from any other Unix Like c…
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Added by Lars on October 8, 2008 at 7:01am —
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Today as I arrived home from work, I noticed on my doorknob a plastic bag with some paper folded inside. It turns out that Joe Weingarten, who is running for Indiana state representative in district 29, stopped through our neighborhood with the intent to meet as many constituents as he could before the election. "To listen to what's bothering me, and let me know he would be working for me if elected." He enclosed a flyer that covered a few key points, and a link to his Website & E-mail addre…
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Added by Lars on October 7, 2008 at 9:04pm —
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I know a lot of you are running Linux. Maybe some of you have been doing it long enough to have discovered environments other than KDE, Gnome, or XFCE4 (the big three). The screen shot attached to this post is using "OpenBOX" as my window manager. Unlike the other three after I type my login name and password in GDM/KDM/XDM I nearly instantly have a working desktop. Everyth…
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Added by Lars on September 28, 2008 at 10:12am —
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My adventure on Friday morning prompted me to set up a new system monitor. I keep reading about
Nagios in this
Time Management for System Administrators book I’m reading. Good book by the way, totally worth the investment. Buy…
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Added by Lars on September 27, 2008 at 10:06pm —
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Never fails. Today is my last day at my current employer. I am the network administrator, which really means I am the entire I.T. department. I manage all of the infrastructure at two locations, as well as a pile of Windows, Linux, and OpenBSD servers. This morning at 7:15am my phone rings, which is never a good sign I might add. It's the CIO of the company calling to tell me nFrame (our datacenter) can't ping our rack. Turns out our Cisco 2621 router decided that it no longer wanted to route pa…
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Added by Lars on September 26, 2008 at 10:26am —
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This morning one of my first tasks was to move one of our web customers off of the old web server onto Zeus. Zeus is running in an environment called hSphere. It's similar to Cpanel, or Plesk for those familiar with web hosting. Unfortunately at some point in the past the domain I'm trying to move has been configured on the Zeus server. This wouldn't be the end of the world EXCEPT when that account was removed it left remnants of the domain orphaned in the database. Two hours later I have the da…
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Added by Lars on September 24, 2008 at 8:53am —
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Recently I set up a profile here on Geeks!. The Site was started by
Chris Pirillo who is as his chat room describes him a geek among geeks.
I’ve spent a little over two weeks on this
social network page and have come to the conclusion I still don’t understand what the point is. The Forum (Message Board) function doesn’t break down by topics making it difficult to find posts related…
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Added by Lars on September 21, 2008 at 8:09am —
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This article originally posted at
The Eagle in the Bryan/College Station area.
By JOHN PAINTER
Special to The Eagle
“Whiskey X-ray Five Hotel Golf X-ray, this is Whiskey Charlie Five Alpha Alpha Hotel, Over?”
“WC5AAH, this is WX5HGX, go ahead.”
It sounded like just two amateur radio operators beginning a conversation, early on Friday. But, the calling station was the Texas State Operations Center in Austin.…
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Added by Lars on September 18, 2008 at 8:33pm —
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I've got it installed on my laptop. At first blush, I like it. KDE 4.1 is taking some getting used to however.
More after I've used it for a while.
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Added by Lars on September 17, 2008 at 11:12am —
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This Article over at Maximum PC
Has an interview with Microsoft where they explain in their own words what went wrong with the Vista Launch, and what they must fix in order to be successful with Windows 7.
The short list of things that went wrong:
- Instability
- Incompatibility
- Performance
- User Account Control
- Activation
- Version O
…
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Added by Lars on September 16, 2008 at 6:30pm —
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I ran across the following article and thought some of the Chris Pirillo followers would appreciate reading it.
Click Here to Read
In short it shows that out of all enterprise users forced to purchase new systems with Vista Pre-Installed. some 35% of them are reverting them down to Windows XP licenses using the downgrade license loophole. If Vista was the best thing since sliced bread like a lot of the fanboys woul…
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Added by Lars on September 16, 2008 at 3:00pm —
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One of the people who has been around the Chris Pirillo chat for a long time is Nuke, formerly SWAT. He's now doing his own video stream in the evenings. Usually focusing on Guns, Tech, and Beer. Which are all things I can get into so I happened to tune in a few Sundays ago.
It just happened to be the first Sunday of the month, which is when they do a "Wallpaper Giveaway." The rules of the game are, when asked while watching the live stream you submit a wallpaper to the contest you think is esp…
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Added by Lars on September 16, 2008 at 8:46am —
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Well my laptop is back on Fedora 9 from Ubuntu 8.04. I started having some problems with Gnome randomly crashing in new and exciting ways. So I moved to Kubuntu (just apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and adjust the boot loader to use KDM) This solved the strange Gnome problems, but caused a few of it's own. Namely I really don't like KDE.
Enter Fefora 9. As I previously reviewed Fedora 9 surprised me by being a good Operating System. Something Fedora Core 2 was not. Since I needed something diff…
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Added by Lars on September 15, 2008 at 12:55pm —
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I picked up the September 2008 issue of Linux Journal and stumbled across the following UPFRONT article written inside.
Every so often, you read on Slashdot, Digg, or some other techie news site that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. It’s finally to the point that any end user could sit down at a computer and happily compute away. The applications are sufficiently sanitized and Windows-like that even Grandma can use them. I think it’s fair to say that most of our previous conceptions of “…
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Added by Lars on September 11, 2008 at 7:00am —
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A portion of my job has been holding the hands of our customers as they attempt to migrate their website and mail from whoever they were hosting with previously to our servers. As often as not the domain is locked, and the customer has no idea who registered the domain for them, much less any idea what the login information might be for any accounts attached to the domain.
The primary tool I use to find out who the registrar of any particular domain happens to be nslookup. This queries the vari…
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Added by Lars on September 10, 2008 at 7:00am —
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I am in the process of moving from Windows to Linux on all of my personal computer systems. My laptop no longer dual boots Vista 64bit Business and Ubuntu 8.04. It is now a strictly Ubuntu workstation. My desktop at home currently dual boots a 40gb Windows XP Media Center Edition install, and a 400+ GB Ubuntu install. The Windows system is there strictly for the Dorktoberfest VI Lan Party which will happen in October.
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Added by Lars on September 9, 2008 at 7:00am —
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I haven’t used a Fedora Linux system since Fedora Core 2. Back then the yum updater was terrible and I went looking in search of something that sucked a lot less. On the recommendation of a few folks at the local LUG, I ended up on Ubuntu, and haven’t looked back. Now that our office has a couple of CentOS 5.2 machines I figured it might be time to give an RPM and YUM based Linux distro another look.
The installation of Fedora 9 wasn’t terribly difficult. It asked me a few questions about how I…
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Added by Lars on September 8, 2008 at 7:00am —
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